An untidy whodunit wrapped around an impassioned denunciation of polygamy—an allegedly extinct lifestyle that, Webb’s...
Whenever a man is murdered, the most likely suspect is always his wife. But Solomon Royal, the polygamous Prophet of Purity, a compound on the border of Arizona and Utah, leaves behind so many widows—from his eldest wife, nonpareil cook Sister Ermaline, to Valkyrie Sister Martha and pregnant Sister Jean—that Utah authorities decide to simplify matters, bypassing them all and arresting Esther Corbett, the mother of Solomon’s latest intended, 13-year-old Rebecca Corbett, whose estranged father had swapped her to the Prophet for two 16-year-olds to call his own before Flagstaff private eye Lena Jones (Desert Noir, not reviewed) helped her to escape. Turning a blind eye to Rebecca’s and Lena’s accusations of polygamy, Arizona authorities prepare to extradite Esther to the tender mercies of a Utah court. The only way to save her, Lena decides, is to get the goods on the real killer, and the only way to gather evidence in such a closed community as Purity is to infiltrate it as retired contractor Saul Berkhauser’s latest wife. The only problem is that Saul’s position in Purity is none too secure, plus fiery Lena, still seared by memories of her own mother’s attempt to kill her, is the world’s least convincing submissive wife: she can’t keep her mouth shut (or, sometimes, keep her fists to herself) long enough to listen to an entire potentially incriminating conversation.
An untidy whodunit wrapped around an impassioned denunciation of polygamy—an allegedly extinct lifestyle that, Webb’s closing note argues, continues to flourish, sowing the seeds of many a real-life disaster.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-59058-030-3
Page Count: 302
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2002
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
All these problems are handsomely solved at the unsurprising cost of making the human characters less interesting than the...
Just when you thought you’d seen a detective in every guise imaginable, here comes one in sheep’s clothing.
For years, George Glenn hasn’t been close to anyone but his sheep. Everyday he lets them out, pastures them, reads to them and brings them safely back home to his barn in the guilelessly named Irish village of Glennkill. Now George lies dead, pinned to the ground by a spade. Although his flock haven’t had much experience with this sort of thing, they’re determined to bring his killer to justice. There are of course several obstacles, and debut novelist Swann deals with them in appealingly matter-of-fact terms. Sheep can’t talk to people; they can only listen in on conversations between George’s widow Kate and Bible-basher Beth Jameson. Not even the smartest of them, Othello, Miss Maple (!) and Mopple the Whale, can understand much of what the neighborhood priest is talking about, except that his name is evidently God. They’re afraid to confront suspects like butcher Abraham Rackham and Gabriel O’Rourke, the Gaelic-speaking charmer who’s raising a flock for slaughter. And even after a series of providential discoveries and brainwaves reveals the answer to the riddle, they don’t know how to tell the Glennkill citizenry.
All these problems are handsomely solved at the unsurprising cost of making the human characters less interesting than the sheep. But the sustained tone of straight-faced wonderment is magical.Pub Date: June 5, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-385-52111-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Flying Dolphin/Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
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